PAMPHLETS ON AMERICAN WRITERS • NUMBER 29

James T. Farrell

BY EDGAR M. BRANCH

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS • MINNEAPOLIS

Copyright 1963 by the University of Minnesota

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Printed in the United States of America at theHart Press, Long Prairie, Minnesota

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 63-64001

Distributed to high schools in the United States byMcGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc.

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PUBLISHED IN GREAT BRITAIN, INDIA, AND PAKISTAN BY THE OXFORD

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JAMES T. FARRELL

EDGAR M. BRANCH is professor of English and chairmanof the department at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio.He is the author of The Literary Apprenticeship of

Mark Twain and has written articles fornumerous journals.

James T. Farrell

I WOULD say that any genuine artist seeks to give the fullestpossible expression to his own psychological life-cycle, and that heseeks to give the best organized form that he can to his own way ofseeing the world." James T. Farrell wrote these words in 1948. In aletter to H. L. Mencken two years earlier he had suggested his wayof seeing the world and the course his life had taken: "I was, afterall, a young man of plebeian origins trying to write. The back-ground from which I came was not one which fostered and affirmedthe values of sophisticated literary culture. It was one of spiritualpoverty. Through books, I gained something of a vision of possibil-ities in life . . . As I went on, this . . . new world of envisionedand acquired values . . . stood in striking contrast to the past. . ." He knew that one of his major problems as a writer was todraw upon the "social universe" of his various pasts with truth, andstill to make them "consistent with a conception of expanded val-ues, a fuller life, a broader range of perspectives."

This problem was implicit in his first two tales of any substance,"Slob" (1929) and "Studs" (1930). The first shows a young manstruggling with his drunken aunt. In the second a young man goesto a wake and listens to the crude talk of the dead man's friends.The young man of each tale is deeply disturbed at human degrada-tion, even to the point of revulsion. But his feelings betray deep in-volvement with those concerned, and we observe that the author isfull of his subject. "Slob" is a germ of Farrell's autobiographicalDanny O'Neill pentalogy — Farrell prefers to call it the O'Neill-OTlaherty series — and the other story is the well-known origin of

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the Studs Lonigan trilogy. When he wrote these tales, the "plebe-ian" writer had found books and "expanded values" at the Univer-sity of Chicago near his home.

James Thomas Farrell was born February 27, 1904, in Chicago,where he lived until April 1931, except for eight months in NewYork City during the late 1920's. He was the second oldest of Maryand James Francis Farrell's six children who lived to maturity.Mary Farrell was a native of Chicago. Her parents, John and JuliaBrown Daly, had come to America during the Civil War from abackground of poverty in County Westmeath, Ireland. John Dalybecame a teamster in Chicago, and on his meager earnings he andJulia reared five children. James Francis ("Big Jim") Farrell alsobecame a Chicago teamster after he left his parents' home in Ken-tucky. His father was James Farrell of Tipperary, who had been anoverseer of slaves in Louisiana before he became a Confederate footsoldier in — Farrell believes — the Second Louisiana Infantry Bat-talion, known as the Louisiana Tigers. After the war the ex-soldiersettled in Kentucky and married.

Farrell's father was a strong and enterprising man — he oncetried to start his own saloon in Chicago — but his wages as a team-ster were not adequate to support his growing family. When Far-rell was three, he was taken to live permanently with his grandpar-ents, the Dalys, who were then comfortably supported by an un-married son and daughter. This removal was the most importantevent of Farrell's youth. Eight years later, eager for companionshipand filled with dreams, he moved with his grandmother, his UncleTom, and his Aunt Ella into the middle-class neighborhood, imme-diately west of Washington Park, that was made famous in StudsLonigan. Altogether he attended three of Chicago's parochialschools — once he called his schooling a "mis-education," but re-cently he has praised it for having instilled moral values in him.During his high school years (1919-23) he worked summers and

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after school in the Wagon Call Department of the AmalgamatedExpress Company and continued there full time after graduation.

Faced with a dreary future of office routine, he enrolled as a pre-law student in De Paul University night school in September 1924.He entered the University of Chicago in June 1925, and in fouryears, paying his own way, he completed eight quarters. During1929 and 1930 while working on his Studs Lonigan manuscript, hepublished fiction in Blues, Tambour, and This Quarter and arti-cles in Plain Talk and the New Freeman. After eloping with Doro-thy Butler in April 1931, he lived for a year in Paris, where he re-ceived substantial encouragement from Ezra Pound and SamuelPutnam, editor of the New Review. While he was there, JamesHenle of the Vanguard Press accepted Young Lonigan, an actmarking the beginning of an important editorial association andfriendship. Since 1932 Farrell has made New York City his home,although from 1933 to 1936 he lived for long periods at the Yaddowriters' colony, and for many years he has traveled widely in thiscountry and abroad as a lecturer — his 1956 visit to Israel is relatedin It Has Come to Pass (1958). He has supported himself and hisfamily — he has two sons, Kevin and John — mainly by his writing,at which he works each day wherever he is. In addition he has ac-tively engaged in the public literary and political life of his times,most dramatically, perhaps, in his early and clear-sighted opposi-tion to the Communist literary line during the 1930's. His differ-ences then with Granville Hicks, Michael Gold, Joseph Freeman,Malcolm Cowley, and others led to A Note on Literary Criticism(1936) and to his later attacks on the Communist-dominatedLeague of American Writers. On behalf of the artist he has foughtagainst commercialism, censorship, political dictation, and dog-matic theory — such as the Marxian doctrine of art as a weapon forproletarian revolution. Economically his course has not been easy,and personal troubles have compounded his problems. In 1935 he

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and Dorothy Farrcll separated. His later marriage to Hortense Al-den also ended in divorce and was followed in 1955 by his remar-riage to Dorothy Farrell.

At the University of Chicago Farrell began an intellectual devel-opment as unpredictably intense as Melville's unfolding eightyyears before. Earlier his reading had been casual and undistin-guished, although it included Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, Si-las Marner, Sartor Resartus, Lord Jim, You Know Me, Al, portionsof Dreiser's Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub, and some Shakespeare. In collegehe concentrated his studies in the social sciences, but in 1927 he de-cided to be a writer of fiction, come what might. By 1930 he hadformed lasting attitudes and, like Melville, had swum through li-braries. William James, Dewey, Mead, Nietzsche, Stirner, Russell,Veblen, Freud, Pater, Ibsen, Chekhov, Mencken, Dreiser, Ander-son, Lewis, Hemingway, and Joyce are some who were important tohim. The ardent Catholic became a naturalist and pragmatist whoaffirmed the power of reason to improve society, but his greateststrength lay in a new and liberating sense of ego. He liked fiction,he wrote, having "the pressure of reality," the authority of person-al experience he found in Anderson's Tar. Also by 1930 he had abulky stack of manuscript tales and was well into Studs Lonigan.As early as 1928, in fact, he had begun to develop a life-plan forwriting twenty-five volumes of fiction about the character laternamed Danny O'Neill and others. These books were to be looselyintegrated — as he later wrote, "panels of one work." They wouldpicture life in "connected social areas," first and basically in Chi-cago and then elsewhere.

In 1957 Farrell published his twenty-fifth book of fiction twenty-five years after his first. Behind him were the Studs Lonigan trilogy,the Danny O'Neill pentalogy, the Bernard Carr trilogy, three othernovels, a novelette, ten collections of tales, and a play (with Hor-tense Alden Farrell), as well as six books of essays and criticism.

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The fiction re-creates "connected social areas" through its range ofcharacterization and its use of cultural details. Its geographicalpoles are Chicago and New York City, but other parts of Americaand Europe come in for attention. A surprising number of memo-rable characters move about in their homes and neighborhoods, inleisure and working hours. They represent four generations andtheir actions span half a century. They come from a wide varietyof social, economic, professional, national, and ethnic groups. Re-vealing a steadfast purpose and unrelenting endeavor, Farrell hasexplored, with a complexity not generally recognized, a representa-tive segment of America, and in doing this he has established hispersonal style and his mode of realism. Since 1957 he has addedother "panels." His present goal, time permitting, is to expand hislifework to include at least fifty books of fiction.

Farrell's reputation rose rapidly in the early 1930's, those depres-sion years when proletarian fiction was the vogue. But before theend of the decade his reputation with reviewers began to suffer. Hesoon saw that the current of critical opinion was running againstrealism — his own brand, in particular, offended many left-wingreviewers, Catholics, and academic critics. To be sure, he hashad sympathetic interpreters, notably Joseph Warren Beach andBlanche Gelfant, and he has contemporary admirers, those whomLeslie Fiedler has called "a few surly defenders." Paperback edi-tions of his books have sold into the millions and still sell whenavailable. Many of his major works have been widely translated.He is sometimes called America's greatest living realist or natural-ist, just as years before he was sometimes called proletarian. Butoften praise is tempered with strong reservations, sometimes verystrong indeed. Farrell is still breasting the current.

A typical view writes him off as a pessimistic determinist, nega-tive and unwholesome. The Christian critic Nathan A. Scott, Jr.,believes Farrell has nothing to say because he lacks mythical and

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religious imagination. Others think of him as locked up in his boy-hood or as simply an expert on adolescent behavior. Still othersfind that his style is inadequate. They see his writing as repetitiousand without form or grace. Another group dismisses him as a note-book writer, a photographic realist who literally reports facts orcase histories. Those who hold this view believe he specializes un-imaginatively and at random in the external. In effect they say ofhis work, with Mark Schorer, that "really, the thing is dead." Hisfiction rarely receives close critical attention; yet no recent Ameri-can writer has been so variously — and confidently — impaledsince the 1930's when William Faulkner wras pigeonholed as apornographer, or a regionalist, or a naturalist, or an uneducatedprimitive whose formless writing was needlessly complicated andlacking in affirmation.

It is important to see the wholeness of Farrell's fiction. His writ-ing is truly a single body of work because it expresses his "psycho-logical life-cycle" through the development of a unified subject.His novels and stories, following one after the other, are like agroup of islands in the sea. Each is separate yet all rise out of oneland mass below the ocean's surface, and when seen from abovethey form an impressive pattern.

The scope of Farrell's fiction and its chain-linked social areas aredistinctive features, but a quality more in the grain is its inner con-tinuity of feeling, the shifting yet related clusters of emotions ex-perienced by the characters. The sensitive young man of "Slob"and "Studs" is a simple example. Danny O'Neill in the early story"Helen, I Love You" is a better example. There we see the twelve-year-old boy, new in the neighborhood like Tom Sawyer, hopingthat pretty red-haired Helen Scanlan will be his girl. But he makesno headway with her because he is bashful. Lonesome and fearful,he indulges in lush fantasies as he walks at dusk in Washington

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Park wishing Helen were with him. In this tale of a boy's adorationfor a girl, there is a cluster of emotions — the devotion, the roman-tic yearning, the fear of criticism, the pain and guilt of having lostthe girl through timidity, the longing to be understood — comparable to those that stir Studs Lonigan when he thinks of his lostLucy. In The Face of Time seven-year-old Danny O'Neill feelsmuch the same way about his Aunt Louise. With shifting emphasesthe pattern reappears several times in Danny's later life, helpingto define his growth. Rooted in similar feelings are Bernard Carr'sfantasies of his childhood sweetheart, a symbol of perfection thatworks creatively in his imagination.

The early story "Boyhood" yields a related set of emotions thathas a long history in Farrell's fiction. Danny is thirteen and wantsto be one of the gang, but they think he is a "goof." He recoils intohimself. Although he is a little ashamed at being a misfit, he vowsto fight the injustice and "show them." He will be a great man.With different coloration these feelings bubble up later in Danny,Studs, and Bernard. Other clusters of emotions, like the one cen-tering in nostalgia for the past, similarly recur.

The continuity of Farrell's writing also is seen in the patterns ofaction flowing from the insistent emotions. Consider three se-quences, one each from the major cycles about Danny O'Neill,Studs Lonigan, and Bernard Carr. In the first — actually the sec-ond to be written — Danny O'Neill is taken from his hard-pressedfamily at the age of three to live with his grandparents, the O'Fla-hertys. They share a comfortable apartment in Chicago with theirson Al and two unmarried daughters. Because Danny's father, JimO'Neill, is hurt by this loss of a son to his wife's relatives, he bringsDanny home two weeks later. The boy will not eat and he screamsday and night. Afraid his son will die in convulsions, Jim carrieshim back to Mrs. O'Flaherty at 2 A.M. At her apartment dooDanny opens his arms and says, "Mother, put me to bed!" He will

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often be unhappy and fearful in her home, but he will live withher until, in his middle twenties, he leaves for New York to write.

Toward the close of Judgment Day Studs Lonigan is out of workand desperately ill. Painfully he drags himself through Chicagostreets to his unhappy parental home, his only refuge. As he entersthe apartment he collapses at his mother's feet and says, "Mom,I'm sick. Put me to bed." A few days later, not yet thirty, he dies.

At twenty-nine Bernard Carr is a high-principled writer fromChicago living in New York. In the last chapter of Yet OtherWaters he and his pregnant wife, Elizabeth, have returned to Chi-cago to visit her parents, whom Bernard once scorned but now re-spects. We see them in Jackson Park, an old haunt of his, watchingPhilip, their two-year-old son, play in the grass. Bernard, happilymarried, is determined that Philip's boyhood shall not be "lost andbetrayed" like his own. In the closing scene Philip sleeps peacefullyin his father's arms as the parents return to the grandparents' apart-ment to put him securely to bed.

These sequences are variations on the theme of family loyaltyand estrangement, and they focus on the son's place in the family.Turbulent emotions and actions of critical importance mark thepersonal relationships. Often the characters are unhappy, and evenduring happy moments they are likely to sense the sadness time willbring. Beginnings, setbacks, new starts, and endings are examinedas though to answer the question "Who am I and where am Iheaded?" Moral indignation and confident rationalism enterstrongly into Farrell's sensibility, especially early in his career. Buta deeper strain in his fiction, although not as broodingly apparentas in Dreiser's, is humility: an acceptance, tinged with melancholy,of the mysterious and inevitable transfigurations of time.

This tendency in Farrell's fiction often is expressed in suggestiveshort passages. There is Studs's plaintive recognition not long be-fore his death that "he had never thought . . . his life would turn

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out this way," or Bernard's thoughts in The Road Between: "Chi-cago! He had once been a boy there, a frightened and ordinary boy,and somehow that boy had grown into this Bernard Carr, an Amer-ican writer . . . How had it happened? How had he found hisroad and won the confidence he now felt? The seeds of this changewere not here in New York. They had been planted back there. . . " In his fiction Farrell seeks detailed answers to the question"How had it happened?" and also "What happened?" He tries toidentify the seeds that flower as qualities of mind and heart. As hefills out his characters' lives, he explores growth, self-discovery,creativity — and their frustration. These are his themes.

The business of Farrell's fiction, then, is to trace the "humandestinies" — a favorite phrase — of many characters. Hundreds ofhis people, to be sure, appear only once or twice and have no prop-er history. But scores of others do, and these thread their waythrough separate tales and novels. They include minor characterslike Milt Cogswell and Father Doneggan, more important ones likeRed Kelly and Ed Lanson who appear time after time, and majorones like Jim O'Neill and Peg O'Flaherty. They prosper or decline,or simply live from day to day busy with their thoughts or withother persons. In the Chicago fiction, for example, their interweav-ing lives cohere around family, grammar school, boy gang, church,social circle, high school, fraternity, sports team, office or otherplace of work, poolroom, saloon, Bohemian colony, university, po-litical group. These related centers of activity, shown intimatelyor obliquely, merge to form a colorful neighborhood just as thecharacters form a spectrum of human possibilities. And as theneighborhood flows into the larger city, so the characters' actionsare not contained within neatly plotted sequences. They overflowformal boundaries with the wash of time. The effect is to suggestthe novelty and inconclusiveness of life, particularly the surgingcomplexity of city life.

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Towering out of this setting is the major dramatic action of Far-rell's work to date: the organic story uniting the lives of Studs,Danny, and Bernard, three crucial characters intimately related toeach other in the author's imagination. That story affirms love andthe creative power of mind and will. It traces the rise of a type oftwentieth-century American male — urban, Irish Catholic, aspiring— from a condition of slavish ignorance and appalling humanwaste (Studs) through a growing awareness and independence(Danny) to a state of useful self-fulfillment (Bernard). The story isone of emergence in which Studs represents the life Danny rejects,and Bernard the life he chooses. It presupposes free will not asan endowment but, in Farrell's words, as "an achievement . . .gained . . . through knowledge and the acquisition of control,both over nature and over self." In Farrell's novel Boarding HouseBlues (1961), Danny writes: "A life is blown by a wind called des-tiny, and that wind is controlled by the mind as much as by cir-cumstances." Elsewhere Farrell calls Danny a "bridge character."Yet the crossover Danny makes from Studs's world to Bernard's hasthe decisive effect of a breakthrough. In each world habits of mindand circumstances are important, but Danny learns that the key tofreedom is the creative use of knowledge — the all-important differ-ence. Bernard, who begins where Danny leaves off, gives additionalmoral content to the newly won freedom. In his personal and pro-fessional life Bernard moves toward the integrity appropriate toeach.

In 1941 Farrell wrote to Van Wyck Brooks: "In a sense the themeof my fiction is the American way of life." For one thing, he meantthat his books counteracted American myths of easy success. Inparticular he was thinking of those immigrants "from a poor, bit-ter and oppressed little island" who fail to find their "land ofheart's desire" in America. Their sons and grandsons often growup in a rootless urban culture, and like Studs they may destroy

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themselves. Farrell wrote to his publisher, Henle, in 1942 that hisbooks show the ways in which America deprived its youth duringhis formative years; surely many of his characters are badly twisted— some virtually pinioned — by their experience. In its extremeform the human cost of American growth as seen in Farrell's writ-ing includes education for death.

Education for life also is part of his vision, for some charactersbuild successful futures from past deprivations. "The Americanway of life" in Farrell's writing presupposes the "social making"of all the characters — as his friend Meyer Schapiro phrased it in aletter to Farrell. Just as surely Farrell's vision includes individualsmaking their culture. The poolroom and the brothel are patron-ized by Slug Mason and his kind. Others, like Jim O'Neill, AlO'Flaherty, or Paddy Lonigan, all idealists in their way, help buildworkaday America. Then there are those, including the importantDanny and Bernard, who overcome — and creatively use — defi-ciencies in their pasts to become professional men or artists.Whether Farrell's major characters work with their hands or theirminds, and whether they fail or succeed, most of them aspire torise because they have known privation.

Farrell's subject is the unity of personal and national Americangrowth within the "social universe" of his experience. Followingthat experience closely, his fiction records an urban America —Irish Catholic at the core — growing up; his large cast of charactersmerges into part of a nation sluggishly groping upward to the light.Plebeian vigor leads toward cultural sophistication, and culturalcliches stimulate intellectual revolt. A crude self-defeating individ-ualism gives ground to mutual trust and accomplishment. Theauthor rarely neglects for long the darkness of Studs's world: mancherishes his delusions and hostile divisions. Farrell once calledthat strain in his consciousness "an appalling terror, like a grin-ning and menacing mask." But the promise is also there. Danny

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O'Neill and Bernard Carr, especially, represent the creative willand secular reason that give Farrell's work its over-all Zarathus-trian and Promethean pattern. They turn the feelings of the youngman of "Slob" and "Studs" to account.

Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy (1935) is composed of Young Lonigan(1932), The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan (1934), and Judg-ment Day (1935). Usually called Farrell's best work, it is a power-ful realistic portrayal of the failure of understanding and potentialgrowth in its hero. Studs is the elder son in a well-to-do Irish Cath-olic family that lives in a respectable neighborhood on Chicago'sSouth Side. Essentially he is an aspiring person who responds tooreadily to what is malignant in his culture. Chiefly through Studsthe trilogy dramatizes man's capacity for self-destruction. Its dou-ble condemnation of Studs and his culture is rooted partly in theemotions of Farrell's early faith, for it projects Farrell's Catholicimagination through the mode of secular realism.

The action spans fifteen years, one-half of Studs's life, from June1916 to his death in August 1931. It goes from World War I to earlydepression days; Studs declines from a strong young fighter to animpoverished weakling. The structure of his life is built up in mas-sive, architectural fashion. The first book covers five months in1916, and the last, six months in 1931. In the first, Studs chooses away of life: he scorns learning, breaks with Lucy whom he adores,joins the tough Prairie Avenue gang, becomes "a man" at fifteenwith Iris. Judgment Day shows the outcome of his choice: he is aninsignificant laborer; loses his work, money, and health; gets hisgirl, Catherine, pregnant but does not really love her; at twenty-nine dies a miserable death. In Young Lonigan life seeminglyopens up for him. In Judgment Day it relentlessly closes in.

The ironically titled middle volume spans twelve and one-halfyears, from April 1917 to January 1929. Studs tries to join the army,

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drops out of school, works as a house painter for his father, andgraduates from young punk to accredited poolroom barbarian.When Negro families begin filtering into the neighborhood, theLonigans move to better surroundings, but Studs cannot moveaway from his impoverished values. Instead, he pursues them witha certain single-mindedness. The physically strong chauvinisticidealist changes to the helpless, bloodied figure, to whom "mostthings are just plain crap," draped around the fireplug at Fifty-Eighth Street and Prairie Avenue. The middle volume, then, givesthe stages of Studs's corruption, not neglecting his dense "socialuniverse." The trilogy is fashioned to support Farrell's moralisticview of Studs's life as a darkening progress toward death.

Farrell avoided making Studs a slum-dweller because he wantedto explore the interaction of character and culture in his own mid-dle-class neighborhood. He had come to think of human personal-ity as both social product and social cause. Studs and his friendsconstantly absorb — and then fairly exude — the values of theirmilieu. Notice Studs in a moment of guilt: after having inwardlybelittled Catherine, "he suddenly asked himself who the hell hewas, wanting so damn much, and thinking she wasn't enough forhim." But the momentary self-recognition fizzles out in renewedsocial cliche as he wishes "he were a six-foot handsome bastard,built like a full-back . . ." With equal constancy the story returnsto the personal origins of social disorganization, dramatized inepisodes showing uncontrolled drinking, rapes and beatings, andracial strife.

Studs's character lies at the heart of the work. As a boy Studs ishopeful, imaginative, aware of his feelings, sensitive to criticism but outwardly already "hard." He is a leader with a romantic andadventurous flair, and he wants his life to count for something.Morally he is often at odds with himself; his conscience is active.Nor does he lack will. His painful hacking at his humanity is a

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major point of the action. He wills to be tough because he under-stands how tricky and unreliable his tender feelings can be, andbecause he knows, on the other hand, that toughness can be con-trolled and can get results. The young Studs sometimes remindsus of Huck Finn, who also once tried to make himself feel good bydoing the conventional and inhuman thing. But if Studs begins asa truncated Huck, he ends as his opposite. Each boy seeks humanintimacy, but Studs learns to value his own miserable isolation. Hefinds self-assurance in rigidity. So he knows he is "the real stuff" bythe very act of denying his best impulses. Huck affirms his bestimpulses in action but without full understanding, and humbly hethinks he acts from the devil. Studs repeatedly wills his own victim-ization; ironically his environment "takes" on him all too well be-cause he needs to make his life count. Studs is a rather average per-son who betrays his potentiality for good and descends to disaster.As a spiritually crippled man in Judgment Day he condemns him-self, although falteringly and darkly, for the self-destruction he hasworked.

Farrell wanted to re-create a sense of what life meant to Studsby unfolding the story in Studs's "own words, his own actions, hisown patterns of thought and feeling." In this way he hoped to cre-ate the vivid illusion of life going on, the very process itself, ap-parently free from the author's manipulation. This famous andtraditional "objective" method is Farrell's convention to get per-spective upon personally meaningful material and is not, as someseem to believe, an impossible effort to reveal objective reality asit is, untinged by subjectivity. In practice, Farrell went beyond hisdescription of his method. The writing ranges from the interiormonologue, baring Studs's reveries and dreams, to a neutral record-ing of dialogue, setting, and action — sometimes with Studs notpresent. Perhaps most typically the external world is shown col-ored by Studs's awareness, a merging of the inner and outer in vary-

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ing proportions that helps to determine pace of action, sense oftime, and manner of character portrayal.

Standing with "the older guys" in front of the poolroom, Studsat fifteen watches the neighborhood people go by: ". . . they hadthe same sleepy look his old man always had when he went for awalk. . . . Those dopey-looking guys must envy the gang here,young and free like they were. Old Izzy Hersch, the consumptive,went by. He looked yellow and almost like a ghost; he ran the deli-catessen-bakery down next to Morty Ascher's tailor shop near thecorner of Calumet, but nobody bought anything from him becausehe had the con, and anyway you were liable to get cockroaches ormice in anything you bought. Izzy looked like he was going to havea funeral in his honor any one of these days. Studs felt that Izzymust envy these guys. They were young and strong, and they werethe real stuff; and it wouldn't be long before he'd be one of themand then he'd be the real stuff."

The author also reveals the external world through the mindsof other characters, notably Studs's father and some of Studs'sfriends. These additional perspectives and the stream of action in-volving many persons create a strong sense of cultural process.Studs is thereby firmly related to the past and to his contempo-raries. He is precisely located in a well-defined historical current.

This method leaves room for ideal and mature elements inStuds's culture. Not all of his friends sink into crime like WearyReilley or into destitution like Davey Cohen. Many succeed intheir business or profession. Other persons like Christy, John Con-nolly, Danny O'Neill, Mr. Legare, Helen Shires, Catherine Bana-han, and Lucy are humane and relatively enlightened. Studs oftenis in touch with the excellence that might have given him the"something more" he sought. Nor are the issues and institutions ofthe larger world excluded. Near Lake Michigan Studs overhearstwo students discuss a Communist demonstration against Japanese

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imperialism. In this brief episode the reminder of the nearby uni-versity and of active world forces underscores his ignorant isola-tion, while the surging lake in the background suggests the everaccessible vitality of nature. Farrell's method by no means leavesan impression of Studs as merely a helpless victim. His destinytherefore becomes all the more terrible. Because we feel throughStuds and still see him in context, we experience both the personaltragedy and the full social implications of the flow of his life to-ward the trivial and shameful.

Farrell handles that flow with skill. The chronological episodesform a series of penetrations into Studs's experience during sixty-five days selected from fifteen years. Studs's egotistic sense of time —first cocky, later nostalgic, and subject to a haunting fear of death— contrasts vividly with our understanding of what is happening.From the first we feel time's shaping passage as well as its repetitiveheaviness, a deathlike stagnancy reflected in Studs's boredom. Asthe action proceeds, we see Studs's past in shifting ironic lights,while simultaneously we feel time moving invincibly towardStuds's future death.

Farrell's images and symbols are drawn from the empirical worldand are used incisively to reveal Studs's changing condition. Thecity and nature provide patterns of imagery related to rigidity andfluidity, light and dark. Social actions like drinking or dancing andentire scenes reverberate with meaning, both forward and back-ward in time, through the trilogy. On the surface Father Gil-hooley's graduation talk, for example, is a rather heavy-handedsatire of Catholic religion and education. Yet the fatuous Fatheris a true prophet; he foretells the judgment day. His talk works inStuds Lonigan something like Father Mapple's sermon in MobyDick. On a deep ironic level his dire Catholic admonitions sendout vibrations echoing in Studs's moral imagination and also inFarrell's.

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Although flaws in Studs Lonigan are easy to find, the objectivemethod is a great success. Studs comes fully alive, and lesser char-acters also stay with us. In the main Farrell faithfully gave usStuds's world as Studs knew it. At the same time he charged it withthe meaningful tensions of his personal feelings. He identifiedpartly with Studs, yet the acceptance falls within a larger patternof rejection. Farrell also re-created Studs's world from the perspec-tives he gained through his hard-won study and his growing suc-cess. His knowledge of Dewey's thought, and Mead's, was a majorconstructive force in the trilogy; and in Judgment Day, writtenconsiderably later than the first two volumes, his growing interestin Marxism had its impact. The method also is well suited to Far-rell's view of time and experience. The episodic panorama of Studsand his friends constantly bobbing up in an earthly hell that endsin the blackness of death is itself a fitting expression of an imagi-nation both Catholic and naturalistic.

Farrell's insight that "Studs is a consumer who doesn't know howto consume" applies to Studs as he drinks in platitudes or bootleggin, a living example of the misuse of leisure in a modern city. Butthe trilogy strikes deeper, for it accurately pictures those basic evilscharged against industrial society by the southern Agrarians, whospoke out at the very time Farrell was publishing his work. Theirpremises and solutions were poles apart from his, yet every evilthey attacked is dramatically alive in Studs Lonigan. John CroweRansom called industrialism the contemporary form of pioneer-ing, "a principle of boundless aggression against nature." Studs,brought up in a great industrial center, waged a personal waragainst his nature so that he might realize his dream of the toughhe-man. Farrell once called Studs "the aftermath in dream of thefrontier days."

The trilogy exposes a middle-class morality that arises moreominously from human urges than it does in Sinclair Lewis' Ze-

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nith. In his business Paddy Lonigan practices the aggressive indi-vidualism that Studs acts out in fantasy or reality as LonewolfLonigan, or a hard guy who beats up Jews and Negroes. As DavidOwen has shown, Studs strips the clothing of respectability fromthe illiberal ideal of rugged individualism and so clashes with re-spectability while remaining a son of the culture. The trilogy alsoextends the range of social conflict found in Upton Sinclair orTheodore Dreiser. Possibly it affects us most as an intimate pictureof personal disintegration, of adult corruption fully at work in arepresentative boy who in turn convincingly becomes father to theman. For here is much of the terror and agony of our modern cities.We feel the ugly power of man's irrational drive toward the brutaland destructive. The failure of family, school, and church seems tolie in the impotence of love and reason themselves. Yet we knowthat this black picture is the oblique expression of Farrell's ideal-ism.

Farrell's next major work is the Danny O'Neill pentalogy: AWorld I Never Made (1936), No Star Is Lost (1938), Father andSon (1940), My Days of Anger (1943), and The Face of Time (1953).The action covers more than eighteen years in Danny's life. It goesfrom 1909, when he is an insecure child of five, to 1927 when heresolutely leaves home and his college studies to become a writer inNew York City. As a college student, Danny had appeared brieflyin The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan. There he condemns theignorance and inhumanity of the city life around him. He consid-ers his former beliefs to be lies and delusions, "so many maggotson the mouldering conception of God dead within his mind."Through his writing he intends to win recognition and to helpbuild a better world. The pentalogy shows the growth of the childinto the young man who has found the means to satisfy the deepestneeds of his nature.

This series is central in Farrell's imagination and work. As an

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exploration of Danny's growth, it is the author's most direct ad-venture in self-understanding. For Danny's development is pat-terned upon Farrell's, and Danny's feelings approximate the "wayit was" with Farrell during his formative years. The series there-fore illuminates Farrell's other work and his life. It is rich in mem-orable characterizations based upon members of his family. More-over, taken as a unit the five novels are central in the over-all de-sign of his fiction. The rebel Danny emerges out of a long fore-ground not unlike Studs's in some respects. He wins his freedomand comes to the threshold of accomplishment. Having discardedsupernaturalism, he wants to infuse humanitarian values into theexistence that became "plain crap" to Studs. In these books theimagination that shaped Studs's earthly hell turns to the origins ofDanny's dream of "a newer, cleaner world."

Those origins go back to Danny's traumatic removal at threefrom his own family to the O'Flahertys' home. This experience setsthe pattern of his future relations to others. For example, it helpsto explain the shame he feels toward his mother, and his laterstrained relationship with his father. As the son in two families,a kind of double outsider, he is a subject of contention. He feelsbewildered and insecure. He knows he is different from other boyswhose family life is normal, and naturally he seeks an identity. Hesearches for understanding and a wholesome directness in his per-sonal relations. When these satisfactions are denied him, his re-action is likely to be sharp. Whatever its form, it is intended toassert his importance and independence, to help him leave the pastbehind and to move on to the new friend, the new neighborhood,or the new belief.

True to this basic pattern, Danny gradually takes on substanceand color: Farrell is as interested in showing processes of growthas the end result. In The Face of Time Danny is a dependent, im-pressionable child overshadowed by adults already set in their

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ways. Sensitive to others' feelings toward him, confused in his loyal-ties, reaching out for affection, he is like a chip on a torrent ofadult emotions. Already the later Danny who wants to be a freeman is dimly visible in the small boy, who is effectively contrastedto his dying grandfather, Tom O'Flaherty. As a seven-year-old inA World I Never Made, Danny is still an anxious and shelteredlittle boy, but his experience broadens rapidly. His increasing in-terest in baseball is a good example of Farrell's use of common ma-terials to suggest the dynamics of his growth. Broad outlines of hischaracter begin to emerge: his family loyalty, a sense of honor,quick guilt feelings, a childish judiciousness, a capacity for faith.These qualities, together with the blunderings and weaknesses ofan unsure child, make a balanced picture. Danny is rarely, if ever,sentimentalized.

As a pre-adolescent in No Star Is Lost, Danny lives more in apublic world than before. The insecurities arising from familytroubles grow more intense, and he reaches out eagerly for accept-ance by his classmates. He begins to confront the hierarchy of au-thority he must eventually reject — the chain of command runningfrom God through parents and relatives, priests and nuns, police-men, other grownups, and older boys. In Father and Son, as Dannyenters high school, his troubles grow. His efforts to fit the stereo-types of his surroundings build inner pressures that eventually willerupt in the revolt he cannot yet conceive. For he is still the unsuc-cessful conformist. Yet his very "goofiness" is evidence of an un-channeled creative drive. As the fourth novel ends, Danny stilllacks critical awareness, but the ties to his environment are wearingthin and he is beginning to understand the meaning of his father'slife and death.

When Danny gets to college in My Days of Anger, the old godstumble rapidly as the tensions of many years find release throughknowledge. He develops a naturalistic philosophy with shifting

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overtones of despair, stoical endurance, confidence, and angry in-dignation, but he is really not very different from the little boy towhom affection and fair treatment meant the most. Danny's lifenaturally lacks the gravitational inevitability we feel in Studs's.Yet his reclamation is entirely plausible, for the series elaboratelyshows the complex interaction of his character and his environ-ment. In the particulars of his daily living we can feel the originof his sincere aspirations and his emotional needs that eventuallylead to the University of Chicago and to New York City. As Dannyconfronts the nebulous future — the world he wants to make —Farrell ends his series with a sure touch. In the call room of theExpress Company we again feel the power of delusion, the sense ofpeople terribly caught in the mechanisms of our civilization, theopposite of what Danny wants. Yet there, too, is the vigorous au-thority of an established way of life that puts Danny's highfalutinand untested aspirations in a realistic perspective.

Of all Farrell's work, these novels are richest in major characters.Jim O'Neill is the proud, self-reliant workingman, a person ofmoral force and Danny's true spiritual father. His wife, Lizz, is anaggressive, salty woman, central in the pentalogy as wife, mother,daughter, sister, neighbor. Her father, old Tom O'Flaherty, is fun-damentally a gentle, understanding man still not at ease in Ameri-ca after many years. Mary, Tom's wife, is one of Farrell's finest char-acters, a shrewd, resourceful woman who never loses her zestful willto live and to control. Mary's other children are also exceptionalcreations, especially the rigid and lonely Al, and the self-tormentedPeg who keeps the family in turmoil. These characters, patternedafter members of Farrell's family, are created out of the matureauthor's love and understanding. The pentalogy in effect is an actof piety toward his own people, an effort to recapture their feel-ings, to show how their lives went in the city they helped to build.To be an honest tribute, the picture had to include in all relent-

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lessness their violence and weakness as well as their affection andwill to live.

The adult O'Neills and O'Flahertys intimately affect Danny andform a relatively stable human backdrop to his story. We measurehis growth against it as he changes from a dependent child amongtowering adults to the young man whose educated perception re-duces them to true scale. Yet they are far more than adjuncts toDanny's growth, for they are seen and created as autonomous char-acters. Much of the pentalogy traces their lives and faithfully ex-plores their personal feelings. Moreover they add a special blendof comedy and pathos. For example, Al's childlike illusion that thetrue wise guy achieves cultural status through decorum contrastseffectively with Jim's hardheaded realism. Lizz sprinkles holy wateror has a mass said to shape the future to her desire. We are amusedbut sympathetic, for her action reflects a naive concept of the pow-er of spirit, and her faith measures the immensity of her need. Par-ticularly through Lizz and Mrs. O'Flaherty, Farrell develops abroad and rich humor, a quality of his writing that often goesunrecognized.

Compared to Danny, whose urgent needs drive him through ex-perience, the members of his family show little radical develop-ment, except, perhaps, Jim O'Neill. For instance, Al remains loyalto his ideals of business success and self-improvement through astudy of Lord Chesterfield's letters and the dictionary. The repeti-tion of such effects, emphasizing the cultural naivete" of the family,heightens our sense of what Danny must overcome before he findshis way. The repeated family quarrels over him or over Peg's af-fairs, for example, and the adults' occasional harshness towardDanny burn the pattern of shame and fear into him, thereby mak-ing his ultimate revolt more certain. Also, while reiteration of Al'spretensions to culture, his brother Ned's New Thought, Peg's vainresolutions to reform, and Mary's verbal onslaughts says a great

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deal about the deprivation in their lives, it conveys as well theirstubborn vitality. Farrell's repetition of these traits simultaneouslyshows the O'Neills' and O'Flahertys' strong will to live and thecultural stunting that affects them as it does Studs and his friends.As first- or second-generation immigrants struggling in a competi-tive world, they transmit a heritage that is terribly inadequate, butit has the validity of a bludgeoning weapon forged of necessity inthe heat of battle.

Again, as in Studs Lonigan, the development of individual char-acter is used to reveal historical process in human life. In love andstrife Danny's family act out social forces, seen as individual habitsor predispositions. They quarrel but they stick together and helpeach other. Their loyalty shows the common need of first- and sec-ond-generation Americans for support from family and culturaltradition. Their belligerence derives from their violent past. Thescheming, the shouting, the blows, the talk of splitting skulls withskillets is deeply ingrained and shows them, in effect, meeting theirproblems with the habits and language developed from their Irishpast. Their actions also reveal the clash of cultural patterns be-tween the generations and between economic classes. Farrell'smethod spotlights his characters under institutional pressures, typ-ically from the Church and the job. We feel the power of moneyand dogma in their lives. These books show what it means to havebeen a big-city Irish American Catholic, of modest income, duringthe first three decades of this century — one reason Farrell is a sig-nificant Catholic novelist — and they display the broad humanmeaning of early twentieth-century capitalism, from its drudgeryand harsh competition to its genuine opportunities.

The Danny O'Neill series keeps to the episodic and objectivemethod of Studs Lonigan, for it presents life as felt by the charac-ters during selected segments of time. Studs's limited awarenessdominates in the trilogy, but in the later work the family members

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establish many viewpoints. The resulting autonomy of these con-vincing people strengthens Danny's characterization, for he growsthrough involvement with other persons. Farrell's procedure in thepentalogy suits the theme of individual growth, just as the methodin Studs Lonigan dramatizes the substance of lonely spiritual im-poverishment.

Farrell again uses the Chicago setting with a sure and revealingtouch. But for various reasons neighborhood plays a less crucialrole than it did in the trilogy. Instead we feel the confining apart-ment or job more strongly. Even so, the pentalogy yields a broaderspectrum of life than Studs Lonigan, which is dominated by thedramatic curve of one meager destiny. It includes more characters,traces more careers, presents several persons with explosive emo-tional lives, ranges more widely in action, and follows up Danny'sdrive toward a spacious world. For these reasons the city is morebroadly present in the pentalogy but less immediately and fatallythan in the trilogy, which makes such effective use of urban image-ry. In keeping with its theme of emergence, the Danny O'Neillcycle, unlike Studs Lonigan, leaves a sense of an open society de-spite the limitations of individual characters.

The 2500 pages of the loosely jointed Danny O'Neill books showlittle formal plotting, although causal relationships are everywhereand narrative strands, like the story of Peg and Lorry Robinson,hold some suspense. The episodes are most easily seen as a pano-rama, a vast succession of scenes leading to many climaxes and toa fitting conclusion for Danny. It would indeed be difficult to justi-fy formally all the episodes; yet when the five books are examinedas a unit they reveal a unique structure with its own logic. Thisstructure is appropriate to Danny's position as a son in two fami-lies, to the slowly rising curve of his personal development, to thethree-generation process which transforms immigrant stock fromlaborer to intellectual American, and to the large rhythms of life

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flowing through the books: birth and death, growth and decay, re-generation and sterility. The result is not as intensely dramatic asStuds Lonigan but it is more inclusive, for here Farrell significantlyextends his story of the making of Americans. He broadens the im-plicit indictment of reigning values and urban conditions, and inDanny he presents the emerging artist — his awakening identityand sources of courage.

Farrell rounded out his basic story with the Bernard Carr tril-ogy: Bernard Clare (1946) — after a libel suit brought by a man ofthat name, Clare was changed to Carr in the second novel — TheRoad Between (1949), and Yet Other Waters (1952). The over-allmovement in the three major series is this: Studs goes under,Danny discovers his true calling and escapes from Chicago, andafter considerable floundering Bernard succeeds as a writer in NewYork City. The action occurs between 1927 and 1936, overlappingStuds's later years and in effect taking up the thread where Dannydropped it. The work fulfilled Farrell's long-standing ambition towrite of New York literary life and radical political groups.

The trilogy brings together several matters of importance to Far-rell. He wanted to indicate what happened, spiritually and artisti-cally, to a generation of New York writers and intellectuals whowere either Communists or fellow travelers. (In this respect TheRoad Between and Yet Other Waters approximate romans a clef.)He felt that their relatively sophisticated story also would enrichhis picture of contrasting values and milieus in America. More-over, he intended his hero to mirror the economic and spiritualstruggles he had known. From a working-class family, Bernard il-lustrates Chekhov's statement used as the epigraph to BernardClare: "What writers belonging to the upper class have receivedfrom nature for nothing, plebeians acquire at the cost of theiryouth." As Farrell wrote to Henle in 1944, Bernard wrestles with"the problem of sincerity" and seeks his identity. Eventually he de-

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fines himself vis-a-vis his boyhood past, the economic order, hislovers and wife, and especially the American Communist party,which tries to use him for its political ends. In this work Farrell re-turned to familiar themes, and like James, Dreiser, Anderson, andothers before him, he took up the artist's relation to society — a spe-cial case of his general interest in the social making of Americans.Bernard's life, somewhat like Farrell's, becomes a search for integ-rity, the struggle to be himself through serious writing.

Farrell used the Communist theme to underscore the continuityof his three major cycles. Ironically, the party brings Bernard tohimself. In effect he learns that Communists are moral cousins toStuds: absolutists whose idealism — or fanatic faith — sanctionstheir efforts to be strong and tough and the real stuff in politics andart; or, less kindly, hooligans with a philosophy. But they pay theprice of a shattered integrity and a withered inner life. Whereasthey behave like Studs on a higher level, Bernard becomes moreand more like a mature version of Danny. Three crowd scenes showhis progression. In 1927 on the night Sacco and Vanzetti were ex-ecuted the rebellious Bernard, although no Communist, is strongfor social justice and as capable of "solidarity" with Communist-manipulated demonstrators as Studs is with his gang. In 1932 withsome reservations he marches in the Communist May Day parade.Finally in 1936 he watches the May Day marchers from the curb,aloof, seeing them as both dupes and deceivers, Stalin's "localboys," corruptors of the Revolution. He thinks: "He was alonehere, as he had been in Chicago in his boyhood." But his is theisolation of integrity and not that arising from aggressive hostilitytoward others as in Studs, or from rejection by others as in Danny.Like Danny he is a stranger in a world he never made and has atough endurance Studs never really had, but he has outgrownDanny's frustration and rage. Instead of feeling Danny's early in-security — A Legacy of Fear was Farrell's first choice of title for

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The Face of Time — he knows he can "walk the streets with con-fidence." Like Farrell, he becomes more aware of the evil flowingstraight out of men's hearts and minds, as distinct from the evil ofsocial injustice. In Judgment Day the Communist parade held outhope for the deceived, the "prisoners of starvation" like the Loni-gans, but in Yet Other Waters the Communist marchers are them-selves prisoners of the deceit they practice.

As in the Danny O'Neill series, the central story is the hero'sgrowth. At twenty-one Bernard is an immature, confused romanticwho spends half of 1927 in New York City trying to write. His viewof life as a drab affair and a race with Time in which Death is theultimate winner masks his angry determination to expose life'sshame and injustice through his writing. He publishes nothing,but he grows in self-understanding and compassion. His identifica-tion with the executed Sacco and Vanzetti and his affair with Eva,a young married woman, enable him to define his aims with greatercertainty. His menial jobs teach him the plight of misfits in a so-ciety all out for money and progress. He begins to see his chosencraft and the flaws in his writing more clearly. As Bernard Clareends, he is still relatively immature, a parochial Nietzschean whocan be disagreeably egotistical; but at the core of his personality isa strong will to fight tenaciously for what he wants — and he knowsthat he is a "collection of somebodies wanting to be a synthesis ofsomebodies" through his art.

The Road Between opens in 1932 with Bernard, newly marriedto his Chicago sweetheart, Elizabeth Whelan, receiving recognitionfor his first novel. He still feels a Zarathustrian defiance and lone-liness, yet his art permits him to harness much of his inner torment.Emerging from the 1920's into the 1930's, he is well along on theroad between his conventional Chicago past — reflected in chaptersabout his and Elizabeth's families — and his radically differentNew York life. His growing understanding of each world is the

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measure of his development. With increasing flexibility he comesto understand his crude father's sexual and cultural frustrationsand his own similarity to his pious Catholic mother, who seeks im-mortality not through art but through religion. He sees that, tothe faithful, the Church he has rejected clothes life with meaningand dignity — as he tries to do in his writing — and he begins tosee significant differences between Communist theory and practice.The road between that he travels thus leads from mind to heart.Eventually the journey will enable him to heal a split in his con-sciousness between the rational and the emotional. His earlier con-demnation of his past and his acceptance of Marxism were stepstoward freedom, but his heart now feels the tug of loyalty to familyand to native traditions as part of the truth he will affirm in hiswriting. The Road Between ends in 1933: Bernard publishes hissecond novel, he wins a Loewenthal Fellowship, and Elizabeth'sbaby is born dead.

Yet Other Waters traces Bernard's life for a year and a half be-ginning in the spring of 1935; and as before, interspersed Chicagoscenes take us back to his origins. Now fairly well off, the Carrshave a son, Philip, and Bernard has written a third novel. Hepickets in a strike directed by the party, and he speaks at the 1935American Writers Congress where he sees Communist intriguefrom the inside. He successfully resists inducements to make hisfiction and his criticism follow the party line, explaining that heseeks "to rediscover and put down . . . some of my own conti-nuity." Before long he publicly denounces the party for its disrup-tive tactics and its deceit. As the trilogy ends, Bernard's motherdies and Elizabeth is expecting their second child.

The third volume makes clear that the trilogy, like much ofFarrell's work, sets up an opposition between forces of life anddeath in modern America and shows the growth of life out ofdeath. Bernard believes that death is life's framework and end, the

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extinction of awareness, and that whatever diminishes awareness,whether because of rigid attitudes or cultural sterility, is a form ofdeath-in-life. It may be said, then, that absolutisms like the Churchand the party, although meeting deep human needs, are blindersto help fearful men cope with the fact of death. Bernard regardshis writing as an opposite method of outwitting death: a splurgeof consciousness, a sustained effort to intensify awareness and un-derstanding. He learns that to write with truth he must constantlyreturn to the flux of experience — to his feelings and thoughts —and must distrust all systems claiming perfection and finality; "forother and yet other waters are ever flowing on." This Heraclitean,pragmatic theme is restated through a parallel set of symbols, thewomen in Bernard's life. The vision of Elsie that haunts his imagi-nation is a boyhood ideal of perfection like the Church, and Aliceis his seductive Communist mistress who would like him to knuckleunder. Elizabeth, one of Farrell's best women characters, is intui-tive, warm, sensible, and loyal to Bernard and to the needs of herfamily — a good example of feminine "realism" in contrast to mas-culine "idealism." Bernard's renewed affection for her is a returnto a love which, like a heightened consciousness, is a creativebreach of death's power and one that gives added point to Ber-nard's — and Danny's — earlier angers and hates. Bernard growsthrough his ability to perceive and reject the disembodied ideal,the seductive Absolute, in his emotional life and in his thinking.His final wisdom is to seek the attainable ideal in the ever-chang-ing present reality and not to locate it in a fantasy of the past orfuture, as Studs does, or in a Utopia of this world or a heaven ofthe next. It is the wisdom, strangely echoing Hawthorne, of Saint-Just's phrase, "Happiness is a new idea." For Bernard, this sayingsums up a way of life embracing a democratic social philosophy,a pragmatic trust in experience, a naturalistic metaphysics, and anethics of self-fulfillment in one's personal and occupational lives.

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Judged as fiction, the trilogy is weaker than the two earlier se-ries — unfortunately so, for its climactic position calls for strength.At the heart of the difficulty lies Farrell's uncertain conception ofBernard's character and fate. The original intention to have Ber-nard return to Mother Church or Stalinism — as some of the char-acters in Bernard's fiction do — did not square with Farrell's com-pelling need to have Bernard become triumphantly self-sustaining.The cloudiness in Bernard's character cannot be entirely account-ed for by the effort to highlight the problem of identity or to avoidthe "gianticism" of "Wolfeism," as Farrell explained to F. O. Mat-thiessen in 1946.

Nor do the Bernard Carr books flow from the visceral knowl-edge of environment and manners evident in Farrell's Chicagonovels. Bernard does not really know his world; he is homeless ina way Studs and Danny never are. Although this quality is not in-appropriate to a seeker, Farrell's method, as Blanche Gelfant hasshown, fails to convey the density of Bernard's inner life — thatvery flux he learned to trust. Moreover, for a fertile writer, he isshown too seldom in creative interplay with ideas, and too often,perhaps, in merely hostile relationship to his environment. Farrelljustified his plebeian hero's character to James Henle in 1946: hehad tried to place Bernard "on the same plane as the other char-acters," and he did not want to have "culture . . . conceal realityin the books." Yet we miss a compelling sense in Bernard that hu-man culture, in its broader sense, is his reality, his very livelihoodas a writer. The autonomous "social universe," the seething back-ground Farrell wished to catch, is clouded over by Bernard's nar-row self-absorption. To be sure, the Chicago scenes, some of theChicago characters — notably Mr. Whelan and Mrs. Carr — and anumber of objective New York sequences show much of Farrell'searlier power. Some of the Communists, especially Jake, Sam, andSophie, come alive at intervals, but by and large the New York

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writers and radicals are ghostly figures who inadequately projectsocial realities of magnitude. Although Bernard succeeds in hissignificant quest, the world he moves in lacks the solidity andmeaningful implication of that other rejected world in Studs Loni-gan, and Bernard himself insufficiently represents the positiveideal made real.

Nevertheless, with a brilliance of conception, the trilogy roundsout the organic story begun in Young Lonigan, for Bernard's hard-won wisdom and freedom are ultimately a triumph over spiritualrigidity, seen in rudimentary form in Studs. In its concern with theartist's entanglement with modern society, the work is unusuallyambitious and partly successful. Unquestionably it extends andenriches Farrell's picture of America.

Farrell's other novels and his short stories interlace with histhree major series through characters, settings, and themes. Theyhelp to round out his fictional world.

In Paris during the fall of 1931, he wrote Gas-House McGinty(1933), a novel whose composition influenced the last two volumesof Studs Lonigan. The new work was the first book of a projectedtrilogy on the Amalgamated Express Company in Chicago. Orig-inally called "The Madhouse" and intended as "a Romance ofCommerce and Service," it focuses on the hectic Wagon Call De-partment presided over by Chief Dispatcher Ambrose J. McGintyduring the summer of 1920. The slight narrative centers on thefrustrated McGinty and his demotion to route inspector, parallel-ing the "fall" of the old song, but in a real sense the office itself isthe protagonist (the anonymous, blaring telephone conversationsof the clerks and the incessant sadistic banter create a nightmarishcollective personality), and Farrell constructed his work according-ly. He explained to Henle, probably in July 1931, that his newwork would be "something in which the characters are massed" to

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give a "composite picture . . . a sense of them squirming insidethis large institution." Scenes of McGinty at home or on the street,inter-chapters about the outside route men, and echoes of currentevents in the men's talk and in McGinty's thoughts add perspec-tive; but the crowded, claustrophobic office remains the centralstage. Farrell accurately wrote to Henle in September 1931 that hischaracters "bring everything down to the Call Department, and,so to speak, dump it."

Awake or dreaming, McGinty is a small triumph of character-ization, and his co-workers, including Jim and Danny O'Neill, arecreated deftly and surely. Dialogue used for narration is over-worked (Farrell cut the Vanguard text for the Avon reprint edi-tion), yet the men's frantic talk, functioning as release from devital-izing routine, makes its point and shows Farrell at his best in han-dling a robust vernacular. Despite the evident influence of Joyce'sUlysses in particular, the novel remains fresh and meaningful.It vividly dramatizes the shaping — and scarring — of characterthrough occupation and thus complements the stories of Studs andDanny, which constantly return to the effect of leisure activity andfamily relationships upon personal growth. It vigorously re-createsthe human significance of the commercial purgatory Danny fled.

This Man and This Woman (1951), a successful minor novel, re-turns to the milieu of the Express Company almost incidentally inrelating the domestic catastrophe of the aging Walt and Peg Calla-han. Farrell's theme is "biological tragedy," earlier developed inthe stories of Jim O'Neill, Tom O'Flaherty, and Bernard's parents.It is the erosion of human life through physical and psychologicalcauses, and is seen here particularly in Peg's aberration. The actionis limited to a few days during the 1940's and builds upon Peg'sgrowing paranoia that suffocates her former buoyant spirit. Thenovel's strength lies in the convincing and sympathetic portrayalof her change into the very thing she thinks she sees in the likable

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Walt. Appropriately minimizing the social background, the storyexplores seemingly unbridgeable differences between the sexeswith an intensity suitable to Peg's obsessional character.

Ellen Rogers (1941) also is a story of blighted love in Chicago,this time an affair in 1925 between Edmond Lanson and Ellen,just out of high school. Begun as a novelette, the work developedinto a full-length chronicle whose mounting climax, as Menckenwrote to Farrell in September 1941, was managed with impressiveeffect. Because Farrell believed he had established the middle-classsocial context of his characters in earlier books, he played down thebackground and concentrated on his lovers' personal relationships.The story thus lacks the massive impact of Studs Lonigan, and theorigins of Ed Lanson's destructive egotism are left in obscurity; itsspecific quality is suggested by Thomas Mann's judgment that it"is one of the best love-stories I know, of unusual truthfulness andsimplicity."

Mann believed that Ellen's agony and humiliation followingher abandonment by Ed were brilliantly portrayed. She is, indeed,Farrell's far lesser Anna Karenina, the female in the grip of pas-sion. Once she is in love, her calculating worldliness and her self-sufficiency fall away. Depths of devotion, suffering, and fury openup, and her superficial life takes on meaning. Although Ellen is thesource of emotional strength in this novel, her destroyer, Ed Lan-son, interests us more as an individual and as a symbolic figure ofthe 1920's. Farrell imagined him as a mixture of a middle-classSanine, a shallow Raskolnikov, and an eighteenth-century roguetransplanted to the 1920's; in short, a vulgarized product of "theBen Hecht, Bodenheim, Cabell, Nietzsche influence." Ed is a char-acter of calculated ambiguity. He is not merely morally starved orconventional, but a man who directs his charm, his courage, andhis intelligence toward wicked ends. A rebel in the cause of roman-tic, selfish egotism, he is more dangerous than Studs because he is

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aware — an accomplished technician in evil. Like Studs, he is afoil to Danny (significantly Ellen Rogers came just before My Daysof Anger), for he grows toward irresponsibility and ill will. Hetakes a road more deathlike than Studs's; he is incapable of truelove even in dream. Ellen Rogers is remarkable as a love story andas a study of the deceitful heart that awakens love for the pleasureof strangling it.

Ed Lanson and Danny O'Neill are key figures in BoardingHouse Blues (1961), Farrell's fifteenth published novel. The actionof this uneven but haunting work takes place in 1929 while Dannyis back in Chicago trying to get his career started by writing "aboutthe 58th Street boys in the old neighborhood." The surface storyis the tawdry conflict between Ed and Bridget O'Dair, a nympho-maniac grandmother, over a disintegrating rooming house for Bo-hemians on Chicago's near North Side. But the deeper concern iswith Danny's new-found maturity that is set against a backgroundof triviality and moral irresponsibility symbolized by the house.The theme is man's use of his brief lifetime — Farrell's old concernwith the mysterious alternatives and rhythms of human life. As themoralist Danny writes in his notebook: "The question is which'to be' before we are 'not to be.' There are no Hamlets today whoare of Hamlet's quality."

Farrell's more than two hundred short stories provide ampleevidence, if more is needed, of his expressed intention to shakereality like a sack until it is empty. A few of them, to use RobertMorss Lovett's phrase, literally are chips off the blocks of his nov-els: preliminary experiments, deletions, or parts of abandonedworks. The great majority were written as independent pieces, yetmany of these mesh with the novels and among themselves. All thestories remain faithful to his version of reality while reflecting hiscontinuing experience. Thus they reinforce our impression of hiswriting as a loosely organized, expanding work-in-progress. Danny

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O'Neill or his near equivalent turns up in over fifty stories, oftenat a new time and place like Italy in the mid-1950's. Familiars likeRed Kelly and Willie Collins carry on through several tales. Thestories tighten the personal relationships among Farrell's vast bodyof characters, yet leave his "social universe" open and permit quickprobings of unexplored regions. They add significantly to Farrell'spicture of youth and age, family life and marriage, the Church andclergy, education up through the university, unions and the labor-ing man, the politics of the ward heeler and the radical, Bohemianand literary circles, organized urban violence and organized sports,and the everyday life of city people from the down-and-outer to thechain-store magnate. Working outwards from numerous Chicagocommunities — not confined to what is loosely called Farrell's"South Side" — the stones eventually reach to New York, Paris,and Europe at large. Their relentless pursuit of a fallible humanityis tempered by rare understanding, whether the quarry is a sheik"looking 'em over" on a Chicago beach in the twenties or a con-temporary writer sardonically aware of his self-deception.

The stories range from mere scraps of experience to TommyGallagher's Crusade (1939), a novelette about a Studs-like characterof the 1930's who gives his floundering life direction through fas-cism. Farrell has written that an experience may call for transla-tion into anecdote, sketch, tale, novelette, or novel. Regardless ofthe genre, what matters most in the re-created experience is "thesense of life" arising with "internal conviction" when character isnot sacrificed to ideology or to frozen form. To this end Farrellhas most often, but not invariably, used the "plotless short story,"the artifice of an intentionally primitive method. Not surprisinglyhis tales have been profoundly affected by Chekhov's short fiction,which also emphasizes character over plot and portrays the ordi-nary experience of common people. In Chekhov's prodigal outputFarrell found strong support for his view of short stories as "doors

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of understanding and awareness opening outward into an entireworld." About the time he read the Russian realist Farrell learnedfrom Anderson ("Mary O'Reilley"), Hemingway ("A Casual Inci-dent"), Dreiser ("The Open Road"), and probably Lardner. Se-verely controlling a preference for descriptive and metaphoricallanguage to be seen in his earliest fiction, he rapidly developed hismanner of "letting life speak" by presenting characters throughtheir own consciousness, or their own language:

"Jesus, we sure get paper on the floor here, don't we?" Jim said,seeing the paper stacked and piled under the dining-room tableas he came into the room, wearing his work clothes.

"Well, Jim, I always think this. When the children are playing,I think to myself that if they got their health, it's good, and thepaper they throw on the floor don't hurt the floor, not this floorfull of slivers. You couldn't hurt a floor in this dump," Lizz said,standing in the door.

"The floor's sometimes so covered with papers that we can'teven see it," Jim said.

"Our Lord was born in a stable. It isn't what the outside lookslike. It's what the inside looks like. If your soul is clean, that countsmore than if your house is. Many there are in the world with cleanhouses and dirty souls. And this morning, the souls in this houseare clean. This morning, everyone who's old enough to in my housereceived the Body and Blood of our Blessed Lord," Lizz said, hervoice rising in pride as she drew to the end of her declamation.

"Well, it isn't necessary to have a dirty house in order to have aclean soul," Jim said. [From No Star Is Lost.]

This style has its limitations, as critics have freely shown. Yet itpermits effective and colorful contrasts of idiom and it achievesdramatic immediacy, for character is directly exposed through theinterplay of dialogue and through the free association of interiormonologues. At its best the style is the character-in-action.

Experimenting in his new manner during the prolific years be-tween 1928 and 1932, Farrell quickly came to his lyrical vein of

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James T. Farrell

boyhood loves and sorrows in early stories like "Autumn After-noon" and "Helen, I Love You," and to his fiercely ironic style instories like "The Scarecrow" and "Two Sisters." He progressivelyopened up the broader world of his Chicago youth in such tales as"A Jazz Age Clerk," "Spring Evening," and, somewhat later, "Com-edy Cop" and "The Fastest Runner on Sixty-First Street." "TheyAin't the Men They Used to Be" and "The Girls at the Sphinx"are examples of superior later stories, many of which are told inthe first person or rely more heavily on generalized narrative thanon the vocally dramatic method of dialogue.

Farrell's stories can be heavy-handed and verbose ("Honey, We'llBe Brave"), tendentious ("Reverend Father Gilhooley"), synthetic("Just Boys"), more skilled in portraying belching and banalities("Thanksgiving Spirit") than nuances of feeling or thought ("ThePhilosopher"). Perhaps they are most moving when he gives the il-lusion of dramatic objectivity to simple, compact action knownfrom the inside. Then, most likely, truth to individual characterbecomes social revelation, and we feel the story as a self-sufficientunit. At the same time we seem to be confronted not by a discreteand packaged experience but by an ongoing actuality momentarilyspotlighted in the stream of time. We might say with DannyO'Neill in Boarding House Blues: "It is not a story at all. It is anaccount of ... that which has happened, has come to pass andhas passed to become part of the welter of all that has happened."Although Farrell has succeeded best in his novels, which impres-sively embody his concern with time and human emergence, histales are an integral part of his work, and a surprising number ofthem are individually memorable.

" 'You live badly, my friends. It is shameful to live like that.' "Maxim Gorki's words express the sad indictment of humanity hefound implied in Chekhov's fiction. They suggest the reproach in

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Farrell's writing, although the American's attitude is more yeastywith indignation. Like Chekhov in his way, Farrell makes us awareof life as it might be by showing life as he often found it: riddledwith contempt for mind and fear of affection. But his critical real-ism recognizes man's idealism as well as his shabbiness, and its con-stant assumption is man's capacity for reason and dignity. His hu-manism is friendly to reformist social thought and to modern prag-matism. His fiction says to us that the only real ends are earthlyconsequences and that in human society consequences are men andwomen, affected for better or worse by their culture. Also it saysthat elemental emotions impel men and women toward self-fulfill-ment or self-deception. At the heart of his fiction is an ethics ofself-development more basic than his rationalism and displayed inhis rise from "plebeian" origins and in his stubborn independenceof mind. This ethics is a kind of Emersonian individualism with-out the supernatural aura. It asserts the possibility of radical self-improvement through the right and the will to grow. As he haswritten: "Man is my concern. Freedom is my concern. . . . thedream that each and all have the opportunity to rise to the fullstature of their potential humanity." Farrell is a philosophic nat-uralist who simultaneously sees life in the context of death andaffirms with utter seriousness the values of the Enlightenment. Acantankerous Irishman with a zest for living, he never sees life as"absurd." Nor does he reject modern civilization as an irreclaim-able wasteland. Nostalgia in a Farrell character is not a sign ofabhorrence for the bases of modern society. Instead it is a tech-nique of character revelation, a sign of one man's failure to livethe good life.

The same values are alive in his historical and critical writing:A Note on Literary Criticism (1936), The League of FrightenedPhilistines (1945), Literature and Morality (1947), Reflections atFifty (1954), and even the sly mouthings of Jonathan Titulescu

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Fogarty. These values may be seen in his political developmentthrough various stages of anti-Stalinist socialism to the liberal in-ternationalism of Stevenson and Kennedy. His social criticism,often joyously pugnacious but sometimes shrill, employs touch-stones of human freedom and of growth toward excellence. It iden-tifies shoddy cultural products of the profit system ("The Fate ofWriting in America") and of political orthodoxy ("The LiteraryPopular Front before the War"). It condemns what he believes isintellectually regressive ("The Faith of Lewis Mumford") or mor-ally insensitive ("Moral Censorship and the Ten Command-ments"). Because it attacks sources of cultural stagnancy and per-sonal frustration, his social criticism is blood brother to his fictionand demonstrates anew the unity of his work.

So does his thinking about literature. Books freed him (Bernardlinks library and liberty) and helped him to grow. The unforgetta-ble lesson was that literature intensifies awareness, expands whatGeorge H. Mead called "the sense of the other," so narrowly de-veloped in Studs. By assuring the cultural continuity that crownslife with meaning, literature "humanizes the world." It brings menback to the essence of all "destinies": "the struggles, aspirations,joys, and sorrows of human beings." The writer works at "shaping. . . life itself into literary form" in order to convey his visionthrough "the structure of events, the quality of the characteriza-tion, the complex impact of the work itself." The critic's role is toilluminate the work. He should explore its internal relationshipsand patterns, then relate these to social processes. Farrell's criticismof Joyce, Tolstoi, and others takes this approach, in keeping withhis idea of the two uses of literature, aesthetic and functional, elab-orated in A Note on Literary Criticism.

Farrell's initial advantage as a writer was his thorough posses-sion of an urban, Irish Catholic world. As a child in two familieshe sought acceptance and identity, and as a talented boy in cultur-

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ally illiterate surroundings he groped to find himself. His needcharged his youthful experience with unforgettable tensions andburned it into his consciousness. His fiction, an extension of hissearch for himself, brings his Chicago experience into focus. It cre-ates the larger self — his famous "South Side" in its spatial, tem-poral, cultural, and emotional dimensions — by opening out toinclude family, society, and cultural process extending over half acentury. It explores this past with great objective validity, employ-ing a method and style appropriate to his view of life and drawingupon a constructive imagination both informed and savage. Thewriting remains intensely personal — and this is a deep strength— if only because its subject, the education of Americans, is rootedin his early predicament and in his accomplishment, just as manyof his characters are imagined versions of the possibilities and actu-alities of his experience.

This personal and ultimately self-centered quality of his arthelps to explain its limitations. His shaking the sack of reality —his intimate reality — until it is empty shows his unqualified desireto master what is genuinely his own and to get it all down, andcritics have responded according to their disposition: he is truth-ful, honest, thorough, stubborn, or repetitious. Surely this qualitysometimes hampers control and selectivity, and it may make forwriting that lacks sufficient aesthetic distance in spite of the objec-tive method. Moreover his imagination is most vitally engagedwith his pre-University of Chicago life, that experience of thenerve-ends and the emotions that absorbed him for years before hefound the essential intellectual tools to shape it into clarity. So hebest creates the wounded and confused boy, the aspiring or rebel-lious young man, the adult grotesque, in short, those very humanpersonalities in his fiction who are defined by deep involvementwith their family and their severely limited culture. Yet the dy-namics of his social philosophy and the grand design of his fiction

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call for an equally convincing picture of men and women who haveemerged into larger worlds — social, intellectual, and psychologi-cal. As Robert Gorham Davis has cogently argued (in the NewYork Times Book Review for November 2, 1947), his fiction doesnot do complete justice to what is rich and creative in human con-sciousness, Farrell's included.

This is to say that Farrell has not realized the full potential inhis vision. But his vision is large and single, and step by step he hascreated a single world of ample proportions. His cycles of novelswith his other fiction approximate a sequence, a rarity in our litera-ture. At its best, the American past he creates is deeply authentic,like Gather's Nebraska or Faulkner's South. It is especially mean-ingful to us because, through its rich details of urban manners, itshows the heavy cost exacted of people and institutions by the mod-ern city. His characters' lives expose social process; time slowlybrings change, and the making of personality and the formation ofsociety merge. His Lonigans, O'Flahertys, and O'Neills are deeplyimmersed in their time and place — interesting contrasts to Hem-ingway's disengaged Americans — and his work is exceptional inour fiction for the number of its living characters. The contrastbetween their often blind groping for a better future and the grim-ness of their present, flowing inevitably out of their past, is a sub-ject with tragic power.

In a recent poem Farrell shows himself still running breathlessagainst Time. If his competitor permits, he may have more to say.His novel The Silence of History (1963) explores a crucial periodin the spiritual growth of Eddie Ryan, a young Chicagoan of twen-ty-two, in 1926. It begins an elaborate new cycle called A Universeof Time planned to be "a relativistic panorama of our times" andbuilt — appropriately, one may feel — around the themes of cre-ativity and courage.

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Selected Bibliography

Works of James T. FarrellJNOVELSYoung Lonigan: A Boyhood in Chicago Streets. New York: Vanguard Press, 1932.<Gas-House McGinty. New York: Vanguard Press, 1933.The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan. New York: Vanguard Press, 1934.Judgment Day. New York: Vanguard Press, 1935.Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy. New York: Vanguard Press, 1935. (Includes Young

Lonigan, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, Judgment Day.)A World I Never Made. New York: Vanguard Press, 1936.No Star Is Lost. New York: Vanguard Press, 1938.Father and Son. New York: Vanguard Press, 1940.Ellen Rogers. New York: Vanguard Press, 1941.My Days of Anger. New York: Vanguard Press, 1943.Bernard Clare. New York: Vanguard Press, 1946.The Road Between. New York: Vanguard Press, 1949.This Man and This Woman. New York: Vanguard Press, 1951.Yet Other Waters. New York: Vanguard Press, 1952.The Face of Time. New York: Vanguard Press, 1953.Boarding House Blues. New York: Paperback Library, 1961.The Silence of History. New York: Doubleday, 1963.

SHORT STORIES

Calico Shoes and Other Stories. New York: Vanguard Press, 1934.Guillotine Party and Other Stories. New York: Vanguard Press, 1935.Can All This Grandeur Perish? and Other Stories. New York: Vanguard Press,

1937.The Short Stories of James T. Farrell. New York: Vanguard Press, 1937. (In-

cludes the three volumes above.)Tommy Gallagher's Crusade. New York: Vanguard Press, 1939. (Reprinted in

To Whom It May Concern and Other Stories, 1944.)$1,000 a Week and Other Stories. New York: Vanguard Press, 1942.To Whom It May Concern and Other Stories. New York: Vanguard Press, 1944.When Boyhood Dreams Come True. New York: Vanguard Press, 1946.The Life Adventurous and Other Stories. New York: Vanguard Press, 1947.A Misunderstanding. New York: House of Books, 1949. (A limited edition of 300

copies; reprinted in An American Dream Girl, 1950.)

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Selected Bibliography

An American Dream Girl. New York: Vanguard Press, 1950.French Girls Are Vicious and Other Stories. New York: Vanguard Press, 1955.A Dangerous Woman and Other Stories. New York: New American Library,

Signet edition, 1957. (Followed by Vanguard Press photolithograph edition.)Side Street and Other Stories. New York: Paperback Library, 1961.Sound of a City. New York: Paperback Library, 1962.

OTHER PROSE

A Note on Literary Criticism. New York: Vanguard Press, 1936.The League of Frightened Philistines and Other Papers. New York: Vanguard

Press, 1945.Literature and Morality. New York: Vanguard Press, 1947.The Name Is Fogarty: Private Papers on Public Matters. New York: Vanguard

Press, 1950. (Author's pseudonym: Jonathan Titulescu Fogarty, Esq.)Reflections at Fifty and Other Essays. New York: Vanguard Press, 1954.My Baseball Diary. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1957.It Has Come to Pass. New York: Theodor Herzl Press, 1958.Dialogue on John Dewey, edited by Corliss Lamont. New York: Horizon Press,

1959. (Farrell was one of eleven persons who contributed to this transcriptionof an evening of reminiscences and personal impressions of Dewey.)

Current American ReprintsThe Face of Time. New York: Popular Library. $.75.Father and Son. New York: Popular Library. $.75.It Has Come to Pass. New York: Paperback Library. $.50.My Days of Anger. New York: Popular Library. $.75.No Star Is Lost. New York: Popular Library. $.75.Saturday Night. New York: Signet Books (New American Library). $.35. (Twelve

stories from Farrell's first seven collections.)The Short Stories of James T. Farrell. New York: Universal Library (Grosset

and Dunlap). $2.95. (Includes Farrell's first three volumes of short stories.)Studs Lonigan. New York: Signet Books. $.75. New York: Modern Library (Ran-

dom House). $2.95.A World I Never Made. New York: Popular Library. $.75.

Bibliographies

Branch, Edgar M. A Bibliography of James T. Farrell's Writings, 1921-1957.Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959.

. "A Supplement to the Bibliography of James T. Farrell's Writings,"American Book Collector, 11:42-48 (June 1961).

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EDGAR M. BRANCH

Articles and Chapters of Critical StudiesAldridge, John W. "The Education of James T. Farrell," in In Search of Heresy:

American Literature in an Age of Conformity. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956Beach, Joseph Warren. "James T. Farrell: Tragedy of the Poolroom Loafer" and

"James T. Farrell: The Plight of the Children," in American Fiction, 1920-1940. New York: Macmillan, 1941.

Branch, Edgar M. "American Writer in the Twenties: James T. Farrell and theUniversity of Chicago," American Book Collector, 11:25-32 (June 1961).

. "Destiny, Culture, and Technique: Studs Lonigan," University of KansasCity Review, 29:103-13 (December 1962).

"Studs Lonigan: Symbolism and Theme," College English, 23:191-96(December 1961).

Frohock, Wilbur M. "James T. Farrell: The Precise Content," in The Novel ofViolence in America, second edition. Dallas: Southern Methodist UniversityPress, 1958.

Gelfant, Blanche H. "James T. Farrell: The Ecological Novel," in The Ameri-can City Novel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954.

Glicksberg, Charles I. "The Criticism of James T. Farrell," Southwest Review,35:189-96 (Summer 1950).

Grattan, C. Hartley. "James T. Farrell: Moralist," Harper's, 209:93-94, 96, 98(October 1954).

Gregory, Horace. "James T. Farrell: Beyond the Provinces of Art," New WorldWriting: Fifth Mentor Selection. New York: New American Library, 1954.

Hatfield, Ruth. "The Intellectual Honesty of James T. Farrell," College English,3:337-46 (January 1942).

Howe, Irving. "James T. Farrell —The Critic Calcified," Partisan Review, 14:545-46, 548, 550, 552 (September-October 1947).

Kazin, Alfred. On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern AmericanProse Literature. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1942. Pp. 380-85.

Lovett, Robert Morss. "James T. Farrell," English Journal, 26:347-54 (May1937). (Reprinted as the Introduction to The Short Stories of James T. Far-rell.)

Mitchell, Richard. "Studs Lonigan: Research in Morality," Centennial Review,6:202-14 (Spring 1962).

Owen, David H. "A Pattern of Pseudo-Naturalism: Lynd, Mead, and Farrell."Unpublished dissertation, State University of Iowa, 1950.

Walcutt, Charles C. "James T. Farrell: Aspects of Telling the Whole Truth,"in American Literary Naturalism, A Divided Stream. Minneapolis: Univer-sity of Minnesota Press, 1956.

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